Your Dog Bites Someone: What a Dog-Bite Lawsuit Costs in Canada

If your dog bites someone in Ontario, you are liable. Not "probably liable" — the Dog Owners' Liability Act makes owners strictly liable for bites and attacks, even if the dog had never shown a hint of aggression. No warning, no second chance, no "he's never done that before." Serious attacks — especially facial injuries to children — routinely produce claims in the hundreds of thousands, and your homeowner policy pays only up to its liability limit.

Here's the scenario, the numbers, and where the gap is.

The scenario#

A composite of the cases Canadian insurers and courts actually see:

Your six-year-old neighbour comes into the backyard while your families are barbecuing. Your dog — friendly for nine years — is startled near his food bowl and bites the child's face. Two surgeries, permanent scarring, and a psychologist's report on trauma later, the family's lawyer serves you with a claim for $850,000: future cosmetic surgery, counselling, loss of future earning capacity (scarring affects a legal concept Canadian courts take seriously — "competitive advantage"), and pain and suffering.

Nobody was negligent, exactly. Everyone was ten feet away. It took four seconds.

Who's liable, province by province#

Two wrinkles worth knowing. First, "attack" doesn't require teeth — a large dog knocking down a senior counts. Second, in Ontario the Act also covers attacks by dogs in your care, so dog-sitting your daughter's husky puts you on the hook too.

Do precautions like a fence or vaccination protect me from liability?#

Not from liability itself — and this is backwards from what most Ontario owners believe. A fenced yard, an up-to-date rabies vaccination, a "Beware of Dog" sign, even a spotless nine-year history: none of it changes whether you're liable once your dog bites someone. Under strict liability, liability turns on the bite happening, not on how careful you were beforehand.

What precautions and the victim's own conduct can do is affect damages — how much you owe — through Ontario's rules on provocation and contributory fault. A victim who teased or provoked the dog can have their award reduced. A trespasser committing an offence on your property faces a real barrier of their own (below). But a careful owner whose dog still bites an innocent bystander doesn't get a liability discount for having tried — the Act was written so that the victim's compensation doesn't depend on litigating how responsible the owner was.

What if the person my dog bit was trespassing?#

Trespassers are the one group whose claim genuinely gets harder, though not automatically impossible. Ontario courts can reduce or deny damages where the person injured had no lawful reason to be on your property, or was committing a crime there when the bite happened — the Act's strict liability doesn't erase the relevance of what the victim was doing. A porch pirate bitten mid-theft is in a materially weaker position than a neighbour's child bitten in your backyard.

That said, "trespasser" isn't a magic word, and it doesn't cover every uninvited visitor. A child who wanders in through an open gate, a delivery driver who steps past where a package usually goes, or a door-to-door canvasser are not committing an offence, and a court is unlikely to treat them the way it would treat someone caught breaking in. If your dog has any history of aggression, a locked gate and a clear line between "invited" and "not" is worth more than any sign.

Can my dog walker or a vet be bitten and sue me?#

This is a genuinely less settled question than a stranger bitten on the street. A paid handler — a dog walker, groomer, boarder, or vet tech — is injured while actively in control of your dog, which is a different fact pattern than a bystander with no relationship to the animal. How liability plays out for a professional handler can turn on the specific facts and the province, and it isn't the same clean answer as the strict-liability rule for third parties.

How much do dog bite claims cost in Canada?#

Ranges below are editorial estimates based on the pattern of reported Canadian decisions and settlements — not quotes or predictions, since every case turns on its own facts:

These figures reflect the pattern in reported Canadian decisions and settlements: the pain-and- suffering portion is moderate by design (Canadian non-pecuniary damages are capped), but future care, future surgeries, and earning-capacity claims stack on top — and for a child, "future" means sixty years of it.

Which policy responds to a dog bite claim, and where does it stop?#

The personal liability section of a standard Canadian homeowner, condo, or tenant policy is the one that answers a dog-bite claim. It does two expensive things:

1. Defends you. The insurer hires and pays the lawyers. This matters more than people think — defence costs in an injury claim run well into five figures, and they're typically paid in addition to your limit.
2. Pays the judgment or settlement — up to your liability limit. For most Canadian households, that's $1 million, sometimes still $500,000 on older policies.

Now the gaps, in ascending order of nastiness:

• Breed and bite-history exclusions. Some Canadian insurers exclude named breeds or any dog with a prior bite. If you didn't disclose the dog, you may have a bigger problem than an exclusion.
• The limit itself. On the composite claim above — $850,000 — a $1 million policy holds. Make it two children, or an adult victim with a real income loss, and you're past $1 million while the defence bills are still arriving.
• After the limit, you're alone. Once the insurer pays out its limit, its duty to defend generally ends. The remaining claim is enforced against you: a lien on the house, garnished wages, seized savings.

How does umbrella coverage change the outcome?#

A personal umbrella policy sits over your home policy and adds $1 million to $10 million of protection — for a typical Canadian household, roughly $200–$300 per year for the first $1 million (an estimate based on typical broker pricing, not a quote). In this scenario it does three things:

1. Catches the part of a judgment above your home policy's limit.
2. Keeps paying defence costs after the base policy is exhausted.
3. Covers the same dog at the cottage, the park, and your in-laws' place — it follows you, not your address.

One honest caveat: an umbrella insurer will ask about your dog too. A breed on their excluded list or a prior bite can shrink or block the coverage — which is exactly why the time to buy it is before the four seconds in the backyard, not after.

The bottom line#

You can be a careful owner of a gentle dog and still be strictly liable for a six-figure claim — in Ontario, the law is built that way on purpose. The home policy you already have does the heavy lifting, but it stops at a limit chosen years ago by default. Check the limit. If there's real equity in your house, the gap between "what a mauled child is awarded" and "what your policy pays" is yours personally.